PART 2
I didn’t punch him.
I caught his wrist in the air.
I held it. That’s all. I held it the way you’d hold a door that’s about to slam on a child’s fingers.
With my other arm, I pulled Riley behind me into the hallway.
“Let go of me!” he roared.
“Let go of her first,” I said quietly. “You already did. Good.”
He swung at me with his free hand. It caught me on the cheekbone. I tasted blood.
I didn’t hit back.
I let go of his wrist and stepped backward into the hallway, keeping Riley behind me. I raised both of my hands where everyone could see them.
“I’m not fighting you,” I said, loud enough for the whole hallway. “I’m keeping her safe until the police come.”
The two teenagers on the stairs had their phones out. They’d recorded everything.
The old woman across the hall, Mrs. Dombrowski, opened her door wide. “Bring her in here, honey. Both of you.”
On the phone in my hand, Officer Faust’s voice was very calm.
“Shane, I heard all of it. Police are three minutes out. Stay exactly where you are. Do not go back in there.”
I didn’t.
Two patrol officers came up the stairs. The man, Vince, tried to talk first, of course.
“That convict attacked me! He’s on parole! Arrest him!”
One officer looked at the cut on my cheek. The other looked at Riley’s eye.
Then the teenagers played the video.
Vince was arrested in the hallway for assaulting a child and assaulting me. When the officers searched the apartment, they found a belt hanging on Riley’s bedroom door.
Riley told them everything. Two years. Since he’d moved in. Since he’d told Trish to stop visiting me, because “convicts are a bad influence.”
He’d been taking her mother’s paychecks too.
Officer Faust showed up an hour later in person. She looked at my face, then at Riley holding onto my sleeve.
“For the record,” she said, “a parolee who stops a man from hitting a child, without throwing a single punch, and calls his parole officer first? That’s not a violation.”
She paused.
“That’s the most rehabilitated thing I’ve seen in twenty years.”
Trish came home from her double shift to police cars outside her building.
When she saw Riley’s face in the light, really saw it, she collapsed on the stairs.
“He told me she fell,” she kept saying. “I believed him. I was so tired. I believed him.”
I sat down next to my sister and held her for the first time in nine years.
Vince pleaded guilty in March. Four years.
I used everything I learned in that prison library to help Trish file for a protective order, and to help her get her money back.
Now I work at a legal aid office in Scranton, helping people who can’t afford a lawyer.
Riley comes by every Friday after school and does her homework at my desk.
She kept the dollar-store rabbit.
She says she’s too old for it.
It sits on her pillow every night.
THE END.
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A second chance means nothing if you don’t use it to protect someone. Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is not throw the punch.
Would you have been able to hold back like Shane did? Tell us in the replies.